• A Lifeboat Foundation blog post was shared describing the creation of a synthetic virus engineered to treat cancer in dogs, highlighting an emerging oncolytic-virology application.  
• Participants discussed the “solid-state” nature of viruses, framing them as stable, programmable nanoscale devices for therapeutic or biotechnological use.  
• Interest was expressed in advancing phage-display techniques, with reference to the abundance of phages in seawater (up to 9×10⁸ virions per millilitre) and the potential of phage-ligand technology for detecting or removing bacteria and bacterial toxins.  
• A brief technical exchange noted that ImplicitCAD, a ray-tracing-based solid-modeling tool, is slower for certain tasks than symbolic generators, suggesting a trade-off between geometric fidelity and computational speed in open-source CAD workflows.  
• A request for methods to render 3-D protein structures prompted a recommendation to use the Blender plugin for PyMOL, indicating ongoing efforts to integrate open-source molecular-visualization tools with general-purpose 3-D graphics software.